Posts Tagged ‘bedtime routine’

During the school year, M began her bedtime routine at about 8pm. By 9pm, all of us were in bed and the kids were usually sleeping.

That meant they woke up relatively early, even on the weekends.

Once summer hit, that routine just ended. Bedtime has started around 10pm, and there are times M won’t sleep until almost midnight!

It’s not like I wanted it to be that way.

We went on vacation to Las Vegas about two weeks ago (hence the blog silence), and bedtimes don’t really exist on vacation…

The one thing about late bedtimes means that the girls are sleeping in until about 9:30am now. It’s pretty nice. Sleeping in feels nice. It’s just that simple.

Honestly, I don’t like the super late bedtimes for the girls. I’ve been trying to get the bedtime routine started about 9:30pm, but she’s just not used to it yet. She’ll be in bed by 10pm. Then she’s tossing and turning until almost midnight!

We have read these so many times that most times, she’s reading them to ME!

There are times when I just want to breeze through the book, skip a few pages.. or just say “not now.”

But I don’t.

For one, if I skip a page, she knows the books so well, she knows and corrects me..

Secondly, this is her routine. She looks forward to this time. She doesn’t know that I’m too tired. She doesn’t realize that we’ve been reading these same six books for months and months. She doesn’t even care that it’s the same story over and over again. She likes it. It’s mommy and M time.

How could I breeze through these books when every time I turn a page, her face lights up as she recites it back to me?

How could I feel too tired to read through “Go, Dogs Go” when she and I have special actions we do during parts of the story? It’s like we have our little inside jokes to go along with the story.

How can I brush that off like its trivial, when it’s so important to her?

So every night, I pull every little ounce of energy I have left, grab the stack of books and just power through it.

It’s tough at first, trying to have energy when I feel like I’m running on empty. But by the time I get to the final book, I’m so glad to have that moment with her.